We (well, mostly Alex) have just finished putting together our first trailer! It has some cinematic and also ingame footage - probably the first we've shown off publicly, so you should all go check it out!

Let us know what you think!

Elric
likes this

I really don't do requests and my Arnor Soldier is not fit for BFME. Don't ask me for either.

- I think the ships' rotational acceleration is too high. Even though it is of course physically possible, if you have large enough thrusters, it just doesn't look as expected massive (space)ship behaviour and, for me, breaks the illusion of them having a lot of mass (as opposed to being hollow polygon models ). Also, I imagine the people inside would tip over a lot

- I'm really missing sound effects, but I'm sure you will have those eventually (unless you're going for realistic space physics there too). Good sounds really add to the atmosphere:

bartvh | Join me, make your signature small!Einstein: "We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Looks very nice. You can see the professional attitudes behind the project.

About the trailer: I found the labelled parts at the end to be a bit too short. You see "Capital Ships" and expect a few different scenes but all you get is 2-3 seconds of a single scene before it switches to "Space Physics" and so on.

What's the name of the tune, by the way? I want to listen to it some more

- I think the ships' rotational acceleration is too high. Even though it is of course physically possible, if you have large enough thrusters, it just doesn't look as expected massive (space)ship behaviour and, for me, breaks the illusion of them having a lot of mass (as opposed to being hollow polygon models ). Also, I imagine the people inside would tip over a lot

This really depends on the universe. We're going for more of a "thruster size to weight ratio determines rotation" feel. The EMPOL ships have very large thrusters, so they have very good rotational rates. Some other ships have really small engines, and so really suffer with the turning.

- I'm really missing sound effects, but I'm sure you will have those eventually (unless you're going for realistic space physics there too). Good sounds really add to the atmosphere:

We pulled the SFX for this one. Don't worry, we've got lots of pew pews and explosions .

What's the name of the tune, by the way? I want to listen to it some more

Alex composed it for the trailer . If you like it, you should like the rest of the soundtrack!

More video will likely be forthcoming!

I really don't do requests and my Arnor Soldier is not fit for BFME. Don't ask me for either.

I was fully astounded. Nert, you have never failed to impress me. Great work man. Everything is a work in progress. I know sound is important but we also know sound doesn't travel through a vacuum. Really nice work bro...

About mass and speed, they had the same problems in the transformers movies: They want speed for the action, but they want slowness to show the size. They usually had higher speed during close-combat and then slower in far-away shots and where humans were involved.

Beyond that its a pretty damn impressive trailer. Looking very good!

"I give you private information on corporations for free and I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's 'Man of the Year.'" - Assange

I jaw-dropped! Amazing work so far. The GUI and controls, camera disposition reminded me vaguely of Star Trek: Starfleet Command. I like that.

Well, as the others already said, I think that the thursters are an issue... You know... the way the big/capital ships are turning now, feel like they're just small fighters. Some weight should be taken in consideration...

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I'm super happy to hear everyone's responses. Force Majeure, I just uploaded the full version of the trailer track to our soundcloud, it's also got all the tracks I've put together so far for the demo.

Regarding the physics, I think my favorite part of this discussion going on, is that I was afraid we would have a harder time finding people who care about things like space physics. It warms my heart.

I put together a little video of a battle going on without all the camera movement from the trailer, which I think exaggerates the motion a little. This is how a pretty medium ship moves around ingame when you’re flying it. Should give you a good idea of how they feel to fly.

The gameplay video does answers some questions, and it's interesting how you guys are using the engines as thursters. It's not a bad thing, it just feels somehow, weird, considering those are destroyers, cruisers, dreagnoughts, capital ships... Imagine the amount of force and energy that one would have to spend to invert the engine flow and the turning ratios, the impact on the ship's structure, hull, ect?

Just some constructive criticsm. The game already looks awesome, I personaly, can't wait to play, just these small details that bugs me a little.

The gameplay video does answers some questions, and it's interesting how you guys are using the engines as thursters. It's not a bad thing, it just feels somehow, weird, considering those are destroyers, cruisers, dreagnoughts, capital ships... Imagine the amount of force and energy that one would have to spend to invert the engine flow and the turning ratios, the impact on the ship's structure, hull, ect?

Just some constructive criticsm. The game already looks awesome, I personaly, can't wait to play, just these small details that bugs me a little.

Well, in this kind of game, that kind of "small detail" is pretty much the entire game . We're constantly fine tuning the physics to make it look nice and to play well. The fact is that the super-slow turning ships aren't quite as fun to play with. Sure, eventually we'll have carriers and battleships with many turrets and systems to manage, but the basic cruiser like the one seen in that video that has a limited number of weapons and abilities. There wouldn't be much to do other than mash the mouse buttons if you couldn't maneuver rapidly.

To make really slow combat "work" I'd rather have something more along the lines of an RTT game, which I'd of course like to do too someday . Just not right now.

I'm hoping that playing the demo will convince you that this is fun also .

I had a request for a screenshot or two of the GUI from someone so I've uploaded a trio of new screenshots to our Media page. They take place in our new Ice Nebula environment, which is pretty cool if I do say so myself.

I really don't do requests and my Arnor Soldier is not fit for BFME. Don't ask me for either.

The gameplay video does answers some questions, and it's interesting how you guys are using the engines as thursters. It's not a bad thing, it just feels somehow, weird, considering those are destroyers, cruisers, dreagnoughts, capital ships... Imagine the amount of force and energy that one would have to spend to invert the engine flow and the turning ratios, the impact on the ship's structure, hull, ect?

Just some constructive criticsm. The game already looks awesome, I personaly, can't wait to play, just these small details that bugs me a little.

Well, in this kind of game, that kind of "small detail" is pretty much the entire game . We're constantly fine tuning the physics to make it look nice and to play well. The fact is that the super-slow turning ships aren't quite as fun to play with. Sure, eventually we'll have carriers and battleships with many turrets and systems to manage, but the basic cruiser like the one seen in that video that has a limited number of weapons and abilities. There wouldn't be much to do other than mash the mouse buttons if you couldn't maneuver rapidly.

To make really slow combat "work" I'd rather have something more along the lines of an RTT game, which I'd of course like to do too someday . Just not right now.

Yeah! I couldn't agree more. However what I really miss is a visual thing. Thursters on the model. Right now looks like that it's only the engine that is making it turn, when, since it's a ship of that size, it should have some addtional thursters around the hull. On that video you can see that it's a small fighter, but it has a lot of thursters that visually(&dinamically) works, allowing it's turning rates.

If you could replicate something like that it would really be awesome.

Yeah, those little thrusters, called Reaction Control Thrusters, totally exist on the human ships. But they don't produce a visible effect on the scale of these big ships, like how you can’t see the Galactica’s reaction control thrusters firing when it’s maneuvering.

The big thrusters you can see are actually a by-product of the engine design on human ships. The idea is that they can reverse thrust forward or back, so that you don’t have to perform a 180 degree turn to fire thrusters against your direction of travel if you want to stop. Since they can fire both ways, they're also used to aid in rotation, like on a Starfury, but they're not the sole way a ship turns. Because they're the main drives, they produce a visible effect, but the reaction control thrusters don't really.

The other problem is that it would actually be a pretty non-trivial amount of GPU Cycles to allot to an effect which shouldn’t *technically* be visible. Since we are really into the details, we want to prioritize the graphical details which will best convey what we want to convey. Things Like little animated turrets, or unique explosions based on the atmospheric composition of the ships exploding. So don’t worry! There will be other details!